It was about 18 months ago that I talked about how I had taken the plunge and migrated from eMusic to Apple Music/iTunes and I was amazed at just how much music one could stream. I mean there are entire labels that are off-limits, but what is there is mind-boggling. Just last week I streamed the entire set of Motown Singles and Unreleased Singles. I think it works out to several days worth of music when listened to continually. That is certainly one benefit of working from home, I can play music without headphones (which would definitely be causing me problems if I wore them straight through for that length of time).
I had been much more hesitant to make the move to e-books. I have read a small number of books on my phone, using Libby, and I had ordered a handful of ebooks from Amazon, which pushed them to a Kindle for PC app. But I definitely prefer reading physical books, esp. in the winter when I was riding transit more (though I suppose next winter I will try to tough it out and do the winter biking thing...). Under today's circumstances, with the libraries all closed, I had to look more seriously into figuring this out. It took a bit of sleuthing, but I found a combination of programs that allowed me to read ebooks from the library almost as well as the Kindle.
I then proceeded to go a little crazy, checking out all kinds of books and also filling up my holds queue to the brim. (This isn't anything new for me. There were a few times I hit the upper limit at the library for holds of physical books and there the limit is 100 books!) I also checked in a bunch of books after only skimming them a bit (since the preview is pretty limited indeed). In my mind this is the equivalent of browsing books on the shelf. Unfortunately, this kind of burned through my book limit (and to a lesser degree costs the library as they apparently can only check out the same ebook a set number of times before the book expires and has to be repurchased). So in that sense, the framework for ebooks is simply not as good for readers or for libraries as standard books.
What's also interesting is that there are some very weird gaps. So for instance, I understand that the library can't purchase every ebook that someone would like (though there is a process to request missing titles, though only one request per 30 days!). But for instance, there are a few Italo Calvino books, but not Invisible Cities, which is by far his most famous and arguably most important work. When you click through to look into requesting the title, there are a few other missing works but not Invisible Cities. So if you were going to read ebooks exclusively (and you didn't attempt to purchase any books or get them off of shady sites*...), you would never even be aware of Calvino's best work. And there are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar examples.** I think it is true that the most dedicated ebook readers are also heavy consumers of regular books, but 10 or 20 years down the line, the shape of the literary canon may be completely reshaped based on what happens to be available from which ebook sources. A somewhat depressing thought.†
At any rate, I kind of abused my privileges and was scolded, and they basically froze my account for a week, even though I had never technically gone over my loan or hold limit. I was starting to stress that I was going to miss out on a hold, but there is actually a pretty cool feature which lets you pass on a hold, so it can go to the next person in line and then you remain at the top of the queue. So I shouldn't actually miss out on any of my holds when they do come up. But I will take this to heart and "slow my roll" and focus on borrowing books I have some intention of actually reading.
Going forward, I will start to think more seriously about backing up my enormous library. I probably only have 10 or so years left in this house before we start thinking seriously about downsizing. If I was able to find ebook equivalents of 50-75% of the fiction and maybe 10% of the non-fiction (most of this is a bit out of date and was all bought well before the rise of ebooks), then I could focus on squeezing down the rest of the collection to the true essentials without going into a major panic attack and just getting frozen with indecision. Whether I can actually find someone to take the hard copies off my hands (forget getting paid for them!), is another story. Fortunately, that is not something I need to deal with today, and I can focus on reading my ebooks primarily for enjoyment and not with a view to making the book prove it is still shelf-worthy.
* I am not talking about Project Gutenberg, which is quite above board and has an amazing array of books in the public domain.
** While not quite in the same league, the library has a reasonable number of Martin Amis novels, including Money, but not London Fields. Indeed, this is not available to recommend through the library website either. There are certainly other places to buy and perhaps borrow London Fields as an ebook, but it will probably start to shape people's thinking about what matters in terms of Amis's oeuvre, which is really the problem, more than the immediate accessibility issues.
† Still, thinking back, there have always been classics that have gone out of print, distorting the canon to some extent, and it is possible that more things in the "long tail" remain in print now than they used to. I do remember that while I was in university, the English lit. professor wanted to assign Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale, but it was out of print, and my mother had to go around a bunch of used book stores in Detroit to help us gather enough of the books. That is one thing that has gotten much, much better with the rise of bookfinder and other internet tools, though the golden age of used bookstores and used CD stores is definitely over. But it was a pretty amazing thing to live through. Presumably once a contemporary title has been digitized then it will be available longer than it used to be, though that may not matter if it isn't actually in libraries.
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